Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian woman who was kidnapped and held captive for more than eight years, has told of how she tried to kill herself after being beaten up to 200 times a week by her captor.

3,096 Days

by
Natascha Kampusch

In her forthcoming autobiography Kampusch, 22, said Wolfgang Priklopil called her "my slave" and demanded she perform household tasks semi-naked after he kidnapped her as a 10-year-old in 1998.

Kampusch escaped from Priklopil's house in August 2006 and became a talk show host in Austria less than two years later, although a year ago she spoke of having almost reverted back to the life she had as a prisoner – suffering from anxiety attacks and spending most of her time in her Vienna flat.

Priklopil killed himself hours after Kampusch managed to escape while he was cleaning his car.

"Everything happened very fast. At the very moment I lowered my eyes and started walking past, he grabbed me by the waist and threw me through the open door of his van," Kampusch writes.

"Did I scream? I don't think so. Yet everything inside me was one single scream. It pushed upwards and became lodged far down in my throat."

Kampusch says during the early days of her captivity she was treated well by Priklopil, but in the book she reveals for the first time the violence to which she was later subjected. She talks of how after she reached puberty around the age of 12 her captor "started treating me as if I were dirty and disgusting", and would kick her in the shins or punch her when she walked past him.

"He also subjected me to minor sexual assaults as part of my daily harassment," she writes.

Priklopil began allowing her upstairs to do housework from the age of 14, Kampusch says, but she would be subjected to beatings if her work was deemed to be of poor quality.

"He hated it when the pain made me cry," Kampusch remembers. Priklopil would push her head underwater in the sink and throttle her when she sobbed.

In the extracts published today, Kampusch insists Priklopil's relationship with her "wasn't about sex" – although she says he would tie her to him and force them to share a bed.

"When I was 14, I spent the night above ground for the first time. I lay stiff with fright on his bed as he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his with plastic cuffs.

"But when he manacled me to him on those many nights, it wasn't about sex. The man who'd beat me and locked me in the cellar had something else in mind: he simply wanted something to cuddle."

Priklopil also insisted that Kampusch shave off her hair, and used food deprivation to keep her under his control, she writes. The book also reveals that she was "never fully clothed" while working in the house – a strategy Kampusch says was designed to prevent her from running away.

"Usually, I wore just a cap and knickers – though when he eventually started letting me work in his garden, it was always without my knickers," she writes.

After two years of regular beatings, Kampusch "began a kind of passive resistance", punching herself in the face before Priklopil was able to. When she reached 15, the beatings became even more frequent: "… repeated punches to my head that made me nauseous, sometimes more than 200 blows to my body in a week", Kampusch writes.

The 22-year-old also documents her attempts to kill herself, saying the efforts provoked fear in her captor. Kampusch attempted to strangle herself with items of clothing, slit her wrists with a needle and later lit a fire in the cellar, but said "the will to survive kicked in".

The book also tells of how Priklopil manipulated her psychologically, potentially hinting at why she did not attempt to escape earlier.

"He told me my parents had refused to pay a ransom," she writes. "'Your parents don't love you at all … they don't want you back … they're happy to be rid of you.'"

"These statements were like acid. Systematically, he was undermining my belief in my family."